The United States, and particularly New York, wants to be loved. The most common tourist slogan that one sees outside New York is "I love New York." We're all supposed to love New York. And those of us who do love New York find it hard to imagine people not loving New York, and find it inconceivable that anyone could hate New York.

The American empire -- which I think we can call it -- has this distinguishing feature that sets it apart from other empires. It wants to be loved. The British empire was full of people who were quite content to be feared, respected, and certainly never expected to be loved. But Americans want the world to love them. They want the world to visit New York and buy t-shirts and go home and spread the word that it is the world's greatest city.

Why doesn't it happen? Why do people in Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan or in central Africa feel animosity towards the city? Well, one reason is that they don't actually ever visit it. We tend to forget that the majority of tourists that come to New York come from Western Europe. And those who come from more impoverished parts of the world take one-way tickets and stay. So the people who never come to New York are almost by definition likely to resent its wealth, its sexiness, which is of course a quality that, in religiously conservative societies, is especially abhorrent. And insofar as New York stands for hedonism, not only for the pursuit of wealth but the pursuit of happiness, and happiness in all its legal forms and a number of its illegal forms, it's really not too surprising that the Puritans of our own day, the radical Islamists, single it out as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah on the East Coast of America.